Do you
remember Black & White – an old video
game created by Peter Molyneux? If you don’t, let me refresh your memory. In Black & White you play as a god,
invoked into being by prayers of a family hoping for a miracle to save their
drowning offspring. As time passes, your task is to make more people believe in
you, for your powers – and your avatar – grow with the unwavering faith of new
believers.
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| Image source: BoardGameGeek |
What does
this all have to do with board games and the BoardGameGeek ranking? Well, as I previously said, entering the Cardboard Olympus requires a powerhouse publisher
and a well known designer (besides an excellent game, which should go without
saying). If all that is true however, how is it possible that Twilight Struggle is and has been the
number one for some time now?
Don’t get
me wrong, I am not saying that GMT Games is in any way lacking, but if we compare it
to Wizkids, Asmodee or Fantasy FlightGames, it is still relatively small, with substantially smaller print runs.
Now, it is true that Twilight Struggle
has been the all-time bestseller for GMT, but if you compare the number of
boxes sold to Agricola, you will see
how vastly less popular Twilight Struggle
actually is. Since we know that just being a great game is not enough to
justify a godly position, there must be something more to the seeming miracle
of a political wargame reigning supreme over mages, knights, farmers, colonists, dwarves, mystical lands and power
grids.
And there
is - the loyalty of the people who play games published by GMT Games. Anyone who is a fan
of this publisher, knows that it has a business model that used to be quite
unique. A game goes through a period during which the fans can look at its
prototype components, read designer diaries, ask questions and possibly even become
play-testers, and decide to pledge a fixed sum of money towards the game, which
guarantees them a copy, if the game is ever produced. If enough pledges are
gathered in the time allotted, the game goes to the printers.
The above
system is called P500 and if you’re seeing some similarities to Kickstarter,
then you are absolutely right. This is why I said this business model used to
be unique. It still is actually, but not as much as when GMT started using it years
ago, when crowd-funding was merely a glint in somebody’s eye. Still, even now it
brings something very unique to the table: a sense of participation and
loyalty, usually associated with either the largest and oldest companies, or
those who really know how to work their crowd-funding magic.
Obviously,
P500 has one more advantage: it lowers the financial risks of publishing a
game. However, from the BoardGameGeek ranking perspective, it creates something even more
important: the willingness of the fans to
invest themselves in the project. And this investment means that they will buy,
play, talk and be more disciplined and eager when it comes to rating a game on BGG.
“Hold on a
moment”, a hear you ask, “does that mean that a place on the Cardboard Olympus
can be secured merely by fans who are a vocal minority?” Well, yes… in a way. Although
you may also say, that it’s more of a proof of how much passionate fans can do for a relatively
unknown, but nonetheless excellent game. That is why one should never
underestimate the power of a happy community of followers, for becoming a cardboard
deity is not only a matter of cold calculations but also, to a reasonable
extent, truly a matter of faith.
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